Chained to a Comet with No Way Out
by skylarkblue
Summary: He made a new life. He was studying to be an entomologist. He had a job at Weiner Hut of all places - and then an angel named Samandriel asked for his help. Spoilers for 8x10. Uses the season one character Matthew Pike as the vessel of Samandriel, due to their shared actor.


When he was a kid he was obsessed with bugs. Creepy crawlies, spiders, anything with those little shiny wings that fluttered around. He even had dreams of becoming an entomologist once he finished high school and college.

Then the plague came - the cursed swarm that he barely escaped with his life, thanks to the two brothers who skipped town soon after. As he studied through the rest of his school career he'd often wondered - who were those men? How did they know so much? There was nothing to give him a satisfying answer. Eventually he stopped caring, and when they appeared on the news under the accusation of murder he'd put them out of his mind completely. But at least then he'd had the names - Sam and Dean Winchester.

Sam had been nice enough. Even though things had improved with his father after the swarm, Sam's words were what gave him the courage to eventually fight back, resist, and leave. After one particularly brutal screaming match when he was eighteen, Matthew Pike packed his bags and moved out, college application under one arm and lease under the other. He already had a steady part-time job at a local fast food joint and enough saved up in his account to last him a few months. College life had been a breath of fresh air in his otherwise ordinary life. Away from his family he began to develop more as a person, and to his surprise, his interest in insects was rekindled. A biology class added fuel to the fire. He began to really enjoy it, often staying up late to read through textbooks, even restarting his collection.

He named his pet tarantula Charlotte. It was dorky, he knew, and his girlfriend, Sophie, teased him mercilessly over it. He wouldn't have it any other way.

Six months into his college experience of reinventing himself he decided to dye his hair. Why not, he thought. So on a warm Friday night Sophie sat him down and with some difficulty got his hair about six shades lighter. The aim had been blonde, but no matter their efforts, it ended up a dirty blonde-mouse brown mix. Sophie had laughed, ruffled it once it was dry and told him it looked adorable. At that he'd pulled her into a kiss and afterwards they had...well. And it had finally seemed like life was turning around.

Until he had what he thought was the second worst day of his life, the worst being the night of the swarm.

The day started with him sleeping in and missing his morning class. And no matter the excessive apologies he offered his professor, the woman had angrily refused to listen and threatened his already precarious grade, pointing out he couldn't really afford to miss any more classes. She was right, of course, but it still stung. After the harrying conversation with her, he realised he had about twenty minutes to make his way across town to the Wiener Hut if he was going to make it to work on time.

Like his grade, he couldn't really afford to be late to work.

Matt threw himself into overdrive, grabbing his hat and shirt from a hook just on the inside of his door. Before he had a chance to rush away his hand was caught by Sophie, who pulled him back and kissed his cheek. "Be home quick tonight, okay babe?" She'd said, and he'd nodded, mumbled a promise and kissed her back before sprinting downstairs to his car.

The bastard of a thing stalled when he was almost there, and no matter the praying and pleading, the swearing and even the half hearted kick aimed towards the dash, it stubbornly refused to start again. With no other choice and just ten minutes to get to work on time, he'd left it parked on the side of the road and started running.

The run payed off and he burst through the doors just on time, his shirt soaked through with sweat. Rolling his eyes, the boss had tossed him a spare clean shirt and told him to hurry up. They had customers waiting.

After donning his hat and the loaned shirt, which read _Alfie _on the pocket despite Matt having never met any Alfie who'd worked there, he set to work, unloading fryers, toasting buns, working hard and keeping an eye on the clock. When his shift ended, he bid the boss and his coworkers a quick goodbye before setting off down the road. He didn't bother to change his shirt again. He should've been home in half an hour at most, and it'd just be a waste of time. Idly he thought that maybe now it had time to cool off, the car would start again. And all Matt really wanted was to get home to Sophie, order a pizza, and curl up on the couch to spend the evening watching Bob's Burgers and having his girlfriend teach him the finer points of physics, because that shit was a frustratingly complicated but necessary part of his degree.

What happened next was quick to cement this as the actual worst day of his life.

It started as a high-pitched buzzing in his ears. Just that annoying little tinnitus everyone experienced at one point of another. He reached up and rubbed at his ear, annoyed by it, but ignored it as the car came into his sights. It had been a long day and he was stressed, so no wonder his ears were ringing.

As he approached the car though the ringing intensified to an even stronger, higher pitch, piercing through his skull and making him visibly flinch. One hand went to his forehead, the other to his ear, as an unexpected spike of pain hit. The buzzing reached an even greater height before a voice broke through.

He didn't know how he could hear it. It wasn't from any external source. It was like the buzzing and voice were inside of him. But it spoke to him. It said sorry for the pain.

_My name is Samandriel. I apologise for any discomfort my voice has caused you. I am an angel of the Lord and I require your help._

He tried to dismiss it as just a slightly psychotic manifestation of his stress. But the voice pressed on, and he could hear its desperation. It pleaded with him. It begged.

_Terrible things are going to happen to humanity. If you choose not to say yes to me, a saviour of the people will die. You are greatly important, and a saviour in your own right, if you say yes. I understand you have your own life, but this will not take very long for me to do._

In a flood of colour and noise the voice showed him why it needed his body. He felt compelled to agree, even though he knew the claim he was some kind of saviour was something said out of necessity, just a fast way to get him into agreeing. He knew he was no saviour. Just a dumb kid in a dead end job with a steady girlfriend wearing a borrowed shirt.

Matt looked up to the skies, wondering if Heaven was really up there. He guessed it couldn't hurt to find out.

"Yes, Samandriel."

The next thing he knew there was a burning white light consuming every inch of him. It hurt like being torn apart from the inside out, and his mouth opened wide in a silent scream. When it was done he no longer had control over any of his limbs or even his voice. He felt his head move down, saw his eyes take in his hands as Samandriel observed them with what seemed to be disbelief. But he, Matthew Pike, seemed to be trapped in some distant corner of his brain. Unable to move or cause anything, unable to have any kind of effect.

But he could feel Samandriel. The angel felt like nothing he could imagine in his wildest dreams, but perhaps his most horrific nightmares - searing hot and ice cold simultaneously, unbearably close to him, holding his body captive with the force of a thousand stars. After the gut wrenching feeling of being dragged through the sun and back, Matt found his body, Samandriel, had taken them somewhere completely different - somewhere on the other side of the country. And thanks to the angel's grace he could see the monsters all around them, twisted faces leering and jeering in his direction. The angel made his way across the room and took a seat, looking around, and then Matt saw them - Sam and Dean Winchester.

They'd definitely gotten older since he'd seen them as a teenager. Dean seemed to have hardened into a soldier, staring straight ahead with dead eyes. Sam didn't seem to have changed much outside his appearance; his shaggy Bieber-cut had grown out into, well, a mane.

Then he looked up, and Matt felt his heart go cold. The Winchesters had seemed friendly when they'd first met. Sam had helped him stand up to his father. But looking at them now, the hope he'd first felt upon seeing them was replaced by dread and a quiet panic. Trapped behind Samandriel, however, he could do nothing other than scream on the inside and hope his body would be released soon.

When the brothers spoke to the angel, there was no flicker of recognition across their faces. They had no idea who he was. Just Samandriel, and the name on his stupid shirt - Alfie. And in the angel's own words, he was just a back up vessel. The closest that could be found. Matt felt his stomach clench, whether with fear or anger he didn't know. He just wanted out of this mess. Away from the burning glow that was the angel stuck inside him.

He just wanted to get back to Sophie. Hell, at this point, he wanted to call his Dad and say_ sorry_. He wanted to go home for a weekend. Proper home, the home they'd moved to after the night of the swarm. Somewhere really, properly safe, away from this increasingly maddening bull of angels and demons and the hammer of some obsolete Norse god, and the Winchester brothers, who may or may not have been serial killing psychopaths.

After the whole auction thing was over and they'd spoken to some creatures with truly ugly faces, Matt felt the angel prepare to leave. Hope surged within his chest; once they teleported back to his car, he could slide effortlessly back into his boring normal everyday life, and never look back to any of this. Pretend it was all a bad dream.

And then the demons jumped him.

And then there were several confused minutes of fighting to get free and the horror of feeling the angel inside his body_ panic. _The idea that the angel felt fear was more terrifying than being seized by things that looked like something out of a B horror movie. Matt shrunk into himself, literally, in his mind. He backed away from his post of observing the angel's activities with his body and he hid as best he could. He had never wanted any of this.

The torture was - he had no words. There were no words. He felt not just his pain, the physical pain of his body, but the angel's pain too. And it was so much worse. So much more severe than anything he had felt before. He screamed, and he cried, and he felt his body react, but worse he felt his angel react, and in between screaming and crying and bleeding Samandriel would whisper his apologies to him

_I am so sorry. I'm sorry. Please forgi-_

before being cut off by another scream of pain, from him, from the vessel, from Matt.

It went on for weeks. It never ended.

When Matt felt the metal slam through his skull into his brain, he screamed. Endlessly. After that it was just a string of one spike of pain to another. Samandriel gave up on his apologies. He began screaming in a language the boy didn't recognise, but one of the monsters identified as Enochian. The language of angels.

It was strange to think his body, his brain, was now Samandriel's brain. He no longer occupied it. It no longer obeyed him, and it no longer contained anything of his. It was the angel's through and through. And apparently it had the basic functions of all angels ingrained into it.

He was sure he could hear Samandriel crying.

When the Winchesters burst through that door with an angel of their own, Castiel, the angel his angel seemed to blindly worship and love, it was too late. Matt knew it. And at this point he didn't _care. _At this point, fuck if it was a sin, he wanted to be dead. The relief that coursed through the angel's grace upon seeing Castiel was shocking. It was so strong it jolted Matt awake from his pained stupor into a more serious clarity. Samandriel was staring at Castiel like he held all the answers, and one of the Winchesters screamed at them to go. So they did.

Against the side of the impala - distractedly, the boy was almost delighted to see the familiar car, having admired it in the brief time he saw it as a teen - Samandriel held onto his older brother and openly wept. Upon both feeling his angel's fear and seeing the look on Castiel's face, Matt knew he no longer had even the slightest chance of returning home. As a sliver of blade appeared in the angel's hand, Sophie's face flashed through his mind, and he made his peace with whatever God there was as his angel murmured one last broken apology.

But it was okay now. They were going to a better place.


End file.
